OK so back on the blog horse.

RSA has come and gone, and in the month since reflecting, of a sort, has been happening here.  All the work I saw there stimulated much thought and especially much thought about who we write for and what it is we hope to accomplish in our scholarship.  I say we--of course I mean me.

And for this blog's RSA panel, what of that?  We had, I thought, an excellent discussion.  As I recall, the key thing that emerged from the discussion was a real putting to the test of the idea that just because we are all doing historical work, that we are all doing the same thing.  I said at the panel that what was most interesting about the work of that 10 months or so (!) was that we never really came to any kind of agreement about what our key terms, philosophy, history, rhetoric, meant individually, much less in combination.  The discussion itself suggested that some of the divisions we've pointed out throughout this blog--namely intellectual history and 'on-the-ground' history--determine the way we think about what historical work is, how it operates in the field of rhetoric, and how it stands in relation to a philosophical history.  It was clear for instance that while the definition of rhetorical history as a history of rhetorical instruction (this general idea was discussed I think earlier in the blog, though at the RSA discussion was put specifically in terms of an article by Mike Leff and Richard Graff) could not adequately capture the work we were all doing. 

Such a definition can not account for both the work that Whitney Myers is doing and that Christopher Swift is doing, for instance.  We suggested that this might have to do with the differing fields of English and Communications--but I think earlier discussions on this blog have complicated how formal academic discipline relates to our approaches to historical work.  In particular we have noted that we all work within the tension of disciplinary concerns as generative and restrictive, that this is a tension we feel rather acutely, at least some of us, sometimes.

What I wonder is how much this tension is necessarily intrinsic to the work we are doing as 'rhetoricians.'  I saw papers at this conference--excellent papers--about rhetorical education in Brazil from the 17th century onwards; about the symbolic economy of graffiti; about Frank Sinatra's innovations in album composition; about sound maps of New Orleans.  These all off the top of my head.  These strike me as a significantly distinct projects, with different objects of study and different methodologies, some related explicitly to rhetorical education, some implicitly, some not at all.  I don't think that range of difference is particularly striking for a large conference such as RSA, especially as it prides itself on drawing together disparate disciplines (notably English and Communications, but not exclusively those by any means).  But the differences do make me wonder to what extent we can hope to be operating out of a shared lexicon.  And then, consequently, to what extent is the lack of a shared lexicon productive to our work, and to what extent is it an impediment?